AMERICAN IDEAS, Page 8Water MarketingA Deal That Might Save A Sierra GemNegotiators are trying to sustain Mono Lake by buying irrigationwater from unused fieldsBy Richard Conniff
Get your hackles up, California. We are here to discuss that
choke-thy-neighbor word, water. Here being a quintessentially
innocuous looking and provocative setting, the Los Angeles water
intercept on Lee Vining Creek in the eastern Sierras. On a
brilliant winter afternoon, knee-deep snow covers the intake pond
behind a small concrete dam, and a Steller's jay swoops among the
evergreens. Mount Dana, lacking only an Ansel Adams moon, is lit
up crisply against a cloudless sky. And in the background (the
sticking point), there is the sound of rushing water.
By recent court order, some of the creek's water pours over a
narrow spillway and meanders seven miles down its ancient route to
Mono Lake. "There's probably 5 c.f.s. flowing in there," a water
activist remarks in the technical shorthand (c.f.s. meaning cubic
feet per second) that characterizes California water talk.
But since 1941, most of the Mono Basin's mountain water has
been disappearing from here and from three other streams down a
tube that leads about 225 miles south to Los Angeles. The result,
as bumper stickers, outraged postcards to the Governor, and sober
scientific studies have all amply declared, is that this country's
oldest lake, and one of its most unusual, is being destroyed. Even
the Los Angeles department of water and power concedes that the
Mono Lake ecosystem could collapse. "We feel comfortable that we
have 20 years before it's going to happen," says David Babb, a
staff naturalist. There is time for more studies. But for now, he
says, the department has no way to replace its Mono water, 100,000
acre-feet a year, 17% of the city's supply. The Mono Lake
Committee, a courtroom adversary, says it sees an "incremental
unraveling" happening at Mono right now. It wants the diversion
reduced to 30,000 acre-feet to stabilize the lake at a safe level.
What to do? An acre-foot is the amount of water it would take
to flood an acre one foot deep, and if you can find 70,000 of them
lying around for the taking in Southern California, you can
probably change your name to Yahweh and begin collecting burnt
offerings. No obvious replacement source presented itself in the
Mono Lake dispute until recently, when an economist named Zach
Willey suggested that the city and the environmentalists get
together to buy water from farmers on the western side of the
Sierras in California's vast central valley.
Water marketing, first debated in the 1970s, was an appealing
idea: farmers use about 85% of California's water, and because they
get it from state and federal water projects at subsidized rates,
they tend to squander it. An acre-foot that costs Southern
California urbanites $230 may cost farmers as little as $10, so
even adding in the heavy cost of transporting the water in the
state's vast aqueduct system, there is room for both sides to
benefit from resale of unneeded irrigation allotments. The idea had
two minor drawbacks: many California farmers would sooner spread
salt on their fields than surrender an acre-foot of the water they
regard as their birthright, and second, Willey's employer, the
Environmental Defense Fund, has a reputation for fighting the new
water projects coveted by a lot of farmers. But Willey and E.D.F.
offered to find farmers willing to sell, and the Mono Lake
litigants agreed to pay for the search.
Thus at 5:30 on a recent morning, Willey and a partner, E.D.F.
lawyer Tom Graff, headed from their Oakland office down Highway 5
to dicker with irrigation districts on the west side of the San
Joaquin Valley. An odd pair: Willey, somewhere over 6 ft. 5 in. in
his cowboy boots, lean, green-eyed and with an easy grin; Graff,
short and with a squared-off boxer's nose, but unpugnacious. As
environmentalists go, they speak softly and strangely: California
water distribution suffers under misguided socialist precepts, they
argue. What it needs is fewer bureaucrats and more capitalists.
Turn water into a commodity people can buy or sell, and the market
will soon straighten out inefficient ways of using the stuff.
"We've had 100 years of development, and the environment's been
kicked around pretty bad," Willey says. "We're trying to figure out
a philosophy to rehabilitate things over the next 100 years. You're
not going to do it by wholesale taking away of resources from
industry and farmers, or they're going to wind up litigating you
for the next 100 years. You're going to do it through a system of
incentives." His approach is to "go out and make some deals" with
the people who control water rights -- the farmers.
Willey, himself a product of the central valley, has spent
years scouting irrigation districts. "It's taken a decade of
learning local customs to get where we can have this little
discussion," he says of the morning's talks. "There are still some
groups in the valley that wouldn't sit in the same room with us."
E.D.F. hopes to entice two of the more progressive irrigation
districts, Firebaugh and Broadview, to risk heresy and agree to a
10,000-acre-foot pilot project. "The party line is that nobody
takes water from agriculture. That's what they're going against."
The farmers who've come out to meet Willey are neither heretics
nor hayseeds but businessmen in a carpeted irrigation-district
boardroom. They hem and haw in their own argot. They are worried,
for instance, about load-flow relationships: if the government sets
stringent new standards on selenium in their runoff, they may need
to dilute it with the very water Willey is proposing to buy. Life
is terribly uncertain. The regulatory agencies, they observe, "just
agreed that water runs downhill about two months ago." The farmers
also have this uneasy feeling that the environmentalists want them
to save water by shutting down farmland.
Willey reads the unspoken cue; they are imagining Owens Valley:
The Sequel, in which Los Angeles, having glommed up water and put
farmers out of business in the now infamous valley south of Mono
Basin, casts a thirsty eye their way. He tries to reassure them.
The idea is to spread the water-marketing deals around to avoid a
concentrated effect on any single farming area. No one is telling
farmers to take land out of production or move to the city. A
textbook negotiator, Willey subtly points up benefits that the
farmers would rather temporarily overlook: Wouldn't the income from
water marketing help pay for new irrigation methods that save
water? Could be. Isn't that the sort of thing farmers are looking
at anyway, because it can also boost production? Maybe so.
Both irrigation districts are firm on one point. The bid of $60
an acre-foot that Willey has presented on behalf of the Mono Lake
litigants will cut no deals. One farmer states the proposition from
Willey's point of view: "You get the price up, and if farm prices
aren't so good, you're going to get other districts saying, `Look
what those fellows are doing over there.' " A price upwards of $125
might begin to stir their interest. Then they grimace and stare at
their thumbs as if to say they honestly wished they could do
better.
All this is about as expected, Willey says on the drive home.
If he can get all sides to settle on a price, his next job may be
more difficult. In its last days, the Reagan Administration stated
it had no objections to water marketing (in a memo written by an
Assistant Secretary now handling water-project bonds at Drexel
Burnham Lambert). But other voices may object to the idea that
farmers who receive subsidized water for crops, and further
subsidies not to grow those crops, should profit handsomely on the
sale of the subsidized water. Willey argues that the profits will
be going to produce new public benefits: irrigation systems that
use less water and produce less pollution. A Mono County
businessman suggests that the sale of water rights ought to be
regulated to prevent profiteering. But here Willey hews to the
free-market line: even if the price per acre-foot starts out high,
he says, competition will drive it down to a fair level as other
irrigation districts try to get in on the action. Beyond that,
someone has to pick up the bill for the replacement water. Los
Angeles has agreed to pay part of the cost of the pilot project.
E.D.F. has committed itself to raising the remainder, partly by
lobbying the state and the U.S. Forest Service, which has declared
Mono Lake a National Forest Scenic Area. If tax dollars are
unavailable, says Graff from the backseat, E.D.F. may propose
turning the lake over to a private trust and setting up a
tollbooth.
He is only half kidding. "The idea that the postcard-writing
public should pay as well as write cards is not an easy one for
preservationists to swallow," Graff concedes. But "if there was
more of a willingness to pay for maintaining the environment, we
wouldn't have to rely on bureaucratic whim." It is evident that
Willey and Graff believe in their neo-capitalist approach. The
bottom line then naturally presents itself: Gentlemen, what do we
get for our money?
Pursue that question downstream from the Los Angeles intercept
a day or two after the bargaining session, and find Mono Lake
looking a little depleted, like an old man who has got too small
for the collar of his best shirt. It has shrunk from more than 80
sq. mi. in area to about 60. But in the warm months, 40,000
California gulls still nest on the volcanic islands, and migratory
grebe and phalaropes turn the lake into an ornithological stew. The
tufa towers produced by geological turmoil under the surface still
stand, gnarled spires made of a material that Mark Twain likened
to "inferior mortar dried hard": here a Giacometti sculpture, there
a bust of Richard Milhous Nixon. Nature's freakish pranks. To the
west, snow billows off the high ridge of the Sierras as the sun
drops behind. The light catches on jagged volcanic peaks along the
south shore of the lake. It turns the clusters of tufa white
against the leaden water. Everything is silent, and there is a
sickle moon overhead (not quite Ansel Adams, but getting there).
The light changes from red to wine dark to a milky bruised blue,
and the mountains fade into the sky. In a visitor's register
nearby, someone has scribbled a note: "Es ist wunderbar hier.
